If this technology is as good as it sounds, this spells the end of the mouse. Seriously, my mousepad could be a touchpad.
Would probably need a thimble to avoid friction burn though.
The resolution isn't remotely close to being able to replace a mouse. Why do we use mice instead of touch screens?
1) They allow us to interact with our screens with our hands in a neutral position. A simplified and reengineered Natal could do this.
2) They allow us to move across a thousand pixels with only an inch of movement. It's going to be awhile before the precision of the mouse comes to motion recognition. Even then, motion recognition tends to have small jitter, and if it sees my hand with less than 0.001" precision (not that I can even keep my hand still on that length scale), the cursor will jump around.
Irrelevant. If they were a hot seller, they wouldn't ahve been discontinued. American automakers ahve tried electric cars many times. The market just wasn't there for mas production. That was until gas prices hit 4+ per gallon.
I don't think you looked at the GP's link, which showed Toyota being legally forced to stop selling. Also, if we think about an American case, remember that the EV-1 had a huge wait list of buyers. Wait list + supply and demand curve = potential for higher price. Instead, they quit.
Where do you people get the idea that a free market results in logical decisions?
The Wii has the hardware to make very solid, deep, complex games work. That was possible on a 386. Sure, the Wii is going to have "watered-down" graphics, but graphics don't stand in the way of greatness.
So why would the Wii version have, as mentioned in TFS, a likelihood of being linear and less satisfying for certain players? The Wii has attracted huge numbers of casual gamers, hence it's gigantic install base. Most of these people, however, aren't interested in a very deep experience, because that's never been how the Wii was advertised. I'd wager that the number of potential customers looking for very involved games is much higher among PS3, 360, and of course PC owners than among Wii owners. If you're going to make something for the Wii, it's extremely hard to target this small subset when the casual gamers offer a potentially much more lucrative alternative.
That's another great post. I think I'm comfortable with basic quantum mechanics until someone like you comes along and reminds me of a lot of things I know but that aren't intuitive.
"My own personal opinion about quantum mechanics though is that the equations themselves represent the fundamental thing, and the particular interpretation you place on them is just a convenience."
I thoroughly agree, and I'll try to remember that next time I try to get high and mighty with what are, at the very best, guesses.
That's somewhere in between a metaphor for Hawking Radiation and the real thing.
This isn't really a metaphor exactly. If the equations governing two systems are the same, then we expect the behavior to be the same, and we can describe them in the same terms. Phonons themselves are a good example of this: a phonon is hardly the sort of thing that you would intuitively think of as a particle, but because the equations governing phonons are the same as those governing quantum mechanical particles, physicists describe phonons as particles. Subatomic particles themselves bear very little resemblance to the 'billiard ball' particles that most people imagine. I think that it would be better to say that Hawking radiation is just an effect predicted for systems obeying certain equations, and in that sense, both the acoustic and traditional black holes exhibit completely real Hawking Radiation.
It is true that getting 'acoustic Hawking radiation' wouldn't constitute absolute proof that Black Holes do the same thing - our model may be wrong. What it will do do is provide proof that, assuming our model is correct, Hawking radiation is real, and there isn't some unanticipated effect which invalidates the theory.
I take your point, and you may easily have more expertise than I do (non-specialist grad quantum mechanics classes and a couple undergrad astro classes along with some casual enthusiasm for the subject). My understanding of Hawking radiation is that the split virtual pair explanation isn't physically accurate, but that tunneling of particles through the event horizon is the more physically valid explanation.
1) I'm not aware of an analogous effect that will work for phonons. Tunneling itself is on the wrong lengthscale.
2) Since the virtual particle pair splitting explanation also satisfies the radiation equations, maybe this difference doesn't have much significance. Were someone to convince me of this, I'd fully agree with you.
That's somewhere in between a metaphor for Hawking Radiation and the real thing. It's not true HR, but it would be a nice demonstration if they were to get it to work, especially if they could show some sort of analog to black hole "evaporation," which is the main implication of HR. I suppose that should naturally happen as the separation of the pairs sucks energy from the BEC and slows the fluid inside, shrinking the event-horizon-analogue.
Also, let's get properly flowing BEC layers in our noise canceling headphones!
"Family Guy" is the Denzel Washington of animated series. At one point, it was fresh and original.
But then it became huge. Now everyone loves it because it's "Family Guy." Stewie's gonna say something gay, there's gonna be thirty "like that time I was..." jokes that are sorta mildly amusing. Every once it a while it steps out and does something fresh (Blue Harvest), but then it's back into the routine. Or the 'new' just gets recycled into the routine (like the Shawshank parody.)
Denzel Washington does the same thing as an actor. He's played "Morally right guy that the establishment doesn't like / believe / trust" in like twenty movies now. Every once in a while he steps out and it's fantastic (Training Day), but then he turns around and makes "Man on Fire" three more times for the paychecks.
I think that FG's parodies, best exemplified in "Blue Harvest," suffer from the writing staff's lack of experience writing scenes other than "like that time I was..." jokes. Compare Blue Harvest with the Robot Chicken Star Wars special and you see FG following the original plot and dialog with occasional slight tweaks. When they digress heavily, and they only do it a handful of times, they end up doing rather unsuccessful versions of their normal non sequiturs. Robot Chicken, on the other hand, showed a great deal of creativity. It actually came up with new ideas in the setting of Star Wars, where FG mostly just drew the original Star Wars movie.
Do any of the CPU reviews use old CPUs? What I what to know is how much faster today's CPU is compared to my 3-6 year old CPU, but these hardware reviews typically have a low end much newer/faster than my current system. Practically, a 50% CPU edge is too marginal for me to upgrade, but if a new system was 3X faster than my current aging machine I would be tempted!
1 - Distance measurements are currently kludged together very carefully using bridging. We use one measurement, for instance parallax based on the Earth's movement over 6 months, to show us the distance to a star that has some particular properties and which our models say should always be a certain luminosity. The parallax measurement has error bars.
2- Then we find a much more distant star of that same type that is near a particular type of supernova, and measure its brightness, comparing that to the brightness of our first star to give the distance to the distant star, and thus the supernova as well. That has bigger error bars.
3- Then we look for that type of supernova in very very distant galaxies. Supernovae are brighter than the rest of their galaxy put together while they're burning hot, so we can see them at tremendous distances. We use the measured brightness of that supernova to determine the distance to its galaxy.
4- Then we pair the knowledge of its distance with its velocity with respect to us, which we can determine through redshifting of something with a familiar spectrum. More error bars. That becomes a single point for the determination of the Hubble Constant (and yes, the "constant" is changing).
With only a cursory glance at TFA, it looks to me like this is a way to skip to step 3 or 4, thereby avoiding the need to bridge these length-scales using several techniques.
I agree. From my understanding, California is one of those states where textbooks are chosen by a state board and used throughout the state. In other words, individual districts do not evaluate and choose their own textbooks. Do you have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect an enormous amount of politicking? I think it's fair to say that books are swapped out long before they need to be more for the benefit of the textbook companies and the politicians they're in bed with.
Of course, they obscure this by developing all sorts of "innovative" curriculum changes that require "up-to-date" textbooks that employ "cutting edge" pedagogical methods. Sorry, but I'm not fooled.
20 year old textbooks are typical in CA public schools. Generally textbooks are used until a large fraction of them are falling apart. I went to a private school in CA as well where we had to buy our books. At the end of the year we could sell them back to the school for 90% of the initial value, though, and they were then sold the next year to a new student for the same amount we got for selling them. All of the textbook costs were thus handled by students, but the final "rental" cost per book was $5-10. Were students to actually read electronic textbooks on their computers, electrical costs could be in this same realm. Of course, the reality is that teachers will print out textbooks. If we assume $0.02 per copy, that's about $10 per book charged to the state, and if new books cost as little to the state as they did to students at my school, after 5-10 years this plan will actually cost the state more per student than a real book would.
Am I the only one who finds Google web search less and less useful? There's no way to really force literal search anymore.
So true and frustrating! I can't tell you how many times recently I've tried searching for something "SPECIFIC" and not been able to at all.:-(
I would love to know of a useful alternative that searches for what *I* want, rather than what some non-intelligence presumes I might want (and just wastes my time and their resources).
Yahoo almost always does a better job there, but they don't play very nice with literal searching either. I wish that the search technology commonly used in the mid 90s on, for instance, Lexis Nexis would finally percolate up to mainstream web search engines and replace the primitive grunting, pointing, and shrugging engines used now.
The place I think Apple is still blowing it is in the "netbook" space. I will not spend over $1,000 for an Air to just do email and surf the net. In fact I just bought a Dell Mini 12 with Ubuntu for that, and at $500 is much easier on the wallet. No entry here by Apple despite Apple having a Mobile ready OS, unlike bloated Windows (reason why netbooks run XP), which I just do not get. Just do not fully understand Apple's poo-pooing the netbook space. I see a Netbook as a supplement to my bigger system, that I prefer not to carry. The iPhone can do some basic stuff on the road, but the screen is just not big enough for "surfing" the web, and handling documents etc...
Based on my experience with the Mini 9 and Windows 7 RC compared to the same machine with Ubuntu and XP, I think it's going to take a lot to beat MS in terms of performance on a netbook any time soon.
You are basing your entire argument on the assumption that skipping grades hurts your ability to socialize. Yet you have no proof or even explanation of this. I posit more intelligent students would have a better time getting along with elder students. And that skipping a grade is no more harmful to your social education than is moving. And that may be beneficial to your social education, learning to adapt to the new environment could be good (it was for me personally). Seeing the world from a different perspective may give you a different set of insights. Just because it is different doesn't mean it's wrong, unless that is the social lesson you are trying to impart. I think completing high school and university early could give him time to explore other interests of his. I doubt his parents will throw him out on his own just because he finished university when he could have taken 10more years.
In any case I find this is one of those things society has taken for granted as common knowledge but it has no studies backing it and no real logical foundation to stand on, yet policy is built around it.
The 12-14 year old kids at my college were completely isolated, basically because they were terrified to leave their rooms or talk to anyone, even in class discussions. It's an anecdote, sure, but there were several of them. Or there were at first, before most disappeared, I'm guessing to either drop out or go some place closer to home. Dorms + children = bad.
Gaensicke and colleagues envision two scenarios that might explain the object. In one, a carbon-rich star gets too close to a middle- or heavy-weight black hole, which tears the star apart. Some of this material is absorbed by the black hole, and some is blasted away in a flare that was eventually seen from Earth as SCP 06F6.
I'm not educated in astrophysics and everytime I read something like this I wonder, how does anything manage to get "blasted away" from a black hole? I was under the impression anything that got close to it was absorbed?
Black holes gravitationally pull matter toward them like any other object with the same mass, until you're inside the event horizon, at which point there is no escape. Thus, outside the event horizon, objects will tend to orbit the black hole just as they'd orbit a star of equal mass. Over time, the orbit of gas falling into a black hole decays and the gas falls toward the singularity and its orbital velocity increases. When this happens, the volume occupied by the orbit of the gas decreases, leading to higher density gas and thus heat generated through friction and compression. This heat raises the temperature of the gas, which increases its pressure and can result in a portion of the gas being blown off into space.
The Wii does all of this for about 20W and has a much smaller form factor. I'd say it's much more "green" that the Pulse.
Last time I checked (42 seconds ago), the Wii wasn't a very good replacement for a PC for non-gaming. It was also an order of magnitude slower than a 9800 GT for gaming, and had only a couple of good games.
The real competitor for this is a home built PC based on the Zotac Ion mainboard. Cheaper and better are simultaneously possible if you make it yourself.
Getting rid of stupid clients would be godsent for any admin in the world. Having all applications in the browser would be a huge step forward.
You try, getting three different clients working against a database from the same vendor working properly. They all crave different versions of dotnet, java or whatnot and any new version of the client software demands countless hours of testing just about every possible combination of apps. Upgrades are pure nightmare. Couple this with locked down desktops, profiles that has to be managed and policies that needs hard testing before you alter a single setting.
Getting rid of all those problems alone would be worth serious money for any company. Added benefit would be that backend services would be totally decoupled from what OS the client runs. Microsoft will fight this for all they are worth.
Getting rid of stupid houses would be a godsend for any contractor in the world. Having all people inside a mud hut would be a huge step forward.
You try getting three different walls working against the same roof from the same floor working properly. They all crave different stud layout, nails or whatnot and any new wall demands countless hours of planning for just about every possible combination of other walls. Electrical is a pure nightmare. Couple this with locked doors, surfaces that need to be painted and building codes that need hard testing before you can finish a single room.
Getting rid of all those problems alone would be worth serious money for any construction company. Added benefit would be that the extension cord used to steal electricity from neigbors would be totally decoupled from the type of mud hut. Legacy housebuilders will fight this for all they are worth.
I always thought bundling useful tools with an operating system(i.e. IE) was a poor example of leveraging a monopoly to corner a market.
However, discontinuing support for old products to FORCE new ones on customers, that is leveraging a monopoly in an anti-competitive manner. This is a much more reasonable case to take against Microsoft's more shady practices.
Anti-competitive means that it hurts the competition. How will discontinuing sales of XP hurt the competition?
Oh, come on. Why would they go through the trouble and risk causing a public stir while they can just continue to sit on P2P networks and go fishin'? And before anybody cries "MediaSentry", remember that one need not hack your box to get your i.p. address.
1) They want a public stir. That's the point of their anti-piracy campaign. Scaring 10000 file sharers doesn't do much when there are a fifty million other sharers in the same country who don't notice the stir.
2) The lawsuits haven't slowed piracy.
3) Even if they had slowed piracy, the only metric by which the recording industry measures anti-piracy success is through their sales. Yes, they've been ridiculously high during the recession, but that doesn't mean they think they're high enough.
The Mozilla Foundation makes many tens of millions of dollars from Google. If nobody installs Firefox, Google isn't going to be giving them that kind of money anymore.
The real villains aren't the mozilla people - they're the Opera devs. They put this ball in motion.
Well considering this is a slash-ad for Win7, and the last time I read about Win7 and Vista going against WinXP in benchmarks it got its ass kicked, I am really not surprised they didn't run against XP. I especially liked the part where Infoworld said that XP should only win until you go past 8 cores, that after that Vista and Win7 should win. Of course how many of us are likely to have a 16 or 24 core box sitting around anytime soon?
Hell most of the time my Phenom dual core sits around twiddling its thumbs because it has so much more power than what is required for most everyday tasks. What in the hell would most of us even DO with a 16 or 24 core box besides crank up our electric and cooling bills? When I built this new box I finally took the plunge and went to XP X64 and I have to say I am impressed. It has run everything I have thrown at it with the exception of a 7 year old cheapo TV tuner which I found an X64 replacement for a grand total of $34. So while I think Win7 looks purty, I think I'll just sit this one out, thanks. To anyone who hasn't tried it XP X64 is awesome if you mobo supports it. And with all the bells and whistles, along with a real firewall and AV, I'm running a grand total of 438Mb of RAM, leaving the bulk of my 4 and soon to be 8Gb of RAM for the stuff I ACTUALLY want to run, you know, things other than the OS.
Add to that the fact that XP X64 doesn't seem to be pounding the firewall wanting to call home like Vista did, along with running every single game and app I have thrown at it thanks to WOW, and I think I've found a winner. Question to you Win7 users: Does it try to phone home all the damned time like Vista did last time I tried it? Does it support the older games and apps as well as XP?
The benchmarks in your link found that in terms of accessing 10 concurrent instances of a SQL database, running transactions against 10 concurrent instances of an Outlook.pst file simultaneously, and playing 10.asf files ALL simultaneously, XP achieved more operations per clock cycle than Windows 7.
This is the only benchmark that has found 7 to be slower than XP. It's obviously not what a consumer OS is optimized to run. As we've seen in several other benchmarks, 7 is equivalent to XP for gaming, and faster than it for the vast majority of real world (run a handful of programs, do some photoshop editing, open a web browser, use Office, etc) tasks. Windows 7 has traded away its speed in simultaneously running the 30 absurd tasks in your benchmark, and in return it's faster in doing pretty much everything that a user who isn't using it as a server is going to do.
Build 7000 (beta) was notably faster and slimmer than Build 7100 (RC) when we tried it here - 7000 was highly responsive and usable in 512MB, 7100 thrashes and is slow in 1GB. We were horrified. So forget 7000's admirable speed - it appears the RC was compiled with -fsuck-like-a-dyson-on-steroids enabled.
I just switched from 7000 to 7100 on a 1 gb netbook and saw no change in responsiveness. Both are much more responsive than XP, which liked to stall for ~3s at a time every time I ran something uncached on the Dell Mini 9's SSD. 7 hasn't done it once. You do know that in the first few hours of use it thrashes intentionally to build the index and populate superfetch, right?
And just how do you know this? Or are you just making assumptions?
He doesn't. He's just trolling (otherwise, he would show us the proof, or at least back up his statements some sort of evidence). Unfortunately these days on slashdot it's fashionable to make totally unfounded deragatory assertions about Apple, but if you say one word about Vista or the Office ribbons really aren't all that great, you get modded flamebait or troll.
I know Jobs, and to a much larger extent I know a lot of the people who have been a step or two down the ladder from Jobs over the last 20ish years. I know people on some of those patents, and in the cases I know, Jobs wasn't involved. He sets up the corporate vision under which the patents are produced. That's a valid reason for him to stamp his name onto them. The point of my post was to state that the difference between Gates and Jobs in this case is likely one of personal preferences. Jobs likes to stamp his name, Gates apparently doesn't.
Also, I didn't say anything negative about Apple. If you think that everyone (or anyone) at Apple likes Jobs on a personal note, you're quite out of touch.
His philanthropic accomplishments are certainly praiseworthy, but it's worth remembering that his vast wealth was mainly accumulated with some really unpleasent business tactics.
See "A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm"
Jobs has led his company through fewer, but still not close to zero, unpleasant business tactics. On a personal note, he goes out of his way to make his employees unhappy. He's also fabulously wealthy, and he doesn't give significant money to charity, where Gates has so far given half of his wealth away. Gates seems like the rather bad for some other businesses and good for the people he's affected, where Jobs is moderately bad for other businesses (or perhaps much worse, considering the inability of other companies to produce make clones) and terrible for the people he directly affects.
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If this technology is as good as it sounds, this spells the end of the mouse.
Seriously, my mousepad could be a touchpad.
Would probably need a thimble to avoid friction burn though.
The resolution isn't remotely close to being able to replace a mouse. Why do we use mice instead of touch screens?
1) They allow us to interact with our screens with our hands in a neutral position. A simplified and reengineered Natal could do this.
2) They allow us to move across a thousand pixels with only an inch of movement. It's going to be awhile before the precision of the mouse comes to motion recognition. Even then, motion recognition tends to have small jitter, and if it sees my hand with less than 0.001" precision (not that I can even keep my hand still on that length scale), the cursor will jump around.
Irrelevant. If they were a hot seller, they wouldn't ahve been discontinued. American automakers ahve tried electric cars many times. The market just wasn't there for mas production.
That was until gas prices hit 4+ per gallon.
I don't think you looked at the GP's link, which showed Toyota being legally forced to stop selling. Also, if we think about an American case, remember that the EV-1 had a huge wait list of buyers. Wait list + supply and demand curve = potential for higher price. Instead, they quit.
Where do you people get the idea that a free market results in logical decisions?
The Wii has the hardware to make very solid, deep, complex games work. That was possible on a 386. Sure, the Wii is going to have "watered-down" graphics, but graphics don't stand in the way of greatness.
So why would the Wii version have, as mentioned in TFS, a likelihood of being linear and less satisfying for certain players? The Wii has attracted huge numbers of casual gamers, hence it's gigantic install base. Most of these people, however, aren't interested in a very deep experience, because that's never been how the Wii was advertised. I'd wager that the number of potential customers looking for very involved games is much higher among PS3, 360, and of course PC owners than among Wii owners. If you're going to make something for the Wii, it's extremely hard to target this small subset when the casual gamers offer a potentially much more lucrative alternative.
That's another great post. I think I'm comfortable with basic quantum mechanics until someone like you comes along and reminds me of a lot of things I know but that aren't intuitive.
"My own personal opinion about quantum mechanics though is that the equations themselves represent the fundamental thing, and the particular interpretation you place on them is just a convenience."
I thoroughly agree, and I'll try to remember that next time I try to get high and mighty with what are, at the very best, guesses.
That's somewhere in between a metaphor for Hawking Radiation and the real thing.
This isn't really a metaphor exactly. If the equations governing two systems are the same, then we expect the behavior to be the same, and we can describe them in the same terms. Phonons themselves are a good example of this: a phonon is hardly the sort of thing that you would intuitively think of as a particle, but because the equations governing phonons are the same as those governing quantum mechanical particles, physicists describe phonons as particles. Subatomic particles themselves bear very little resemblance to the 'billiard ball' particles that most people imagine. I think that it would be better to say that Hawking radiation is just an effect predicted for systems obeying certain equations, and in that sense, both the acoustic and traditional black holes exhibit completely real Hawking Radiation.
It is true that getting 'acoustic Hawking radiation' wouldn't constitute absolute proof that Black Holes do the same thing - our model may be wrong. What it will do do is provide proof that, assuming our model is correct, Hawking radiation is real, and there isn't some unanticipated effect which invalidates the theory.
I take your point, and you may easily have more expertise than I do (non-specialist grad quantum mechanics classes and a couple undergrad astro classes along with some casual enthusiasm for the subject). My understanding of Hawking radiation is that the split virtual pair explanation isn't physically accurate, but that tunneling of particles through the event horizon is the more physically valid explanation.
1) I'm not aware of an analogous effect that will work for phonons. Tunneling itself is on the wrong lengthscale.
2) Since the virtual particle pair splitting explanation also satisfies the radiation equations, maybe this difference doesn't have much significance. Were someone to convince me of this, I'd fully agree with you.
That's somewhere in between a metaphor for Hawking Radiation and the real thing. It's not true HR, but it would be a nice demonstration if they were to get it to work, especially if they could show some sort of analog to black hole "evaporation," which is the main implication of HR. I suppose that should naturally happen as the separation of the pairs sucks energy from the BEC and slows the fluid inside, shrinking the event-horizon-analogue.
Also, let's get properly flowing BEC layers in our noise canceling headphones!
"Family Guy" is the Denzel Washington of animated series. At one point, it was fresh and original.
But then it became huge. Now everyone loves it because it's "Family Guy." Stewie's gonna say something gay, there's gonna be thirty "like that time I was..." jokes that are sorta mildly amusing. Every once it a while it steps out and does something fresh (Blue Harvest), but then it's back into the routine. Or the 'new' just gets recycled into the routine (like the Shawshank parody.)
Denzel Washington does the same thing as an actor. He's played "Morally right guy that the establishment doesn't like / believe / trust" in like twenty movies now. Every once in a while he steps out and it's fantastic (Training Day), but then he turns around and makes "Man on Fire" three more times for the paychecks.
I think that FG's parodies, best exemplified in "Blue Harvest," suffer from the writing staff's lack of experience writing scenes other than "like that time I was..." jokes. Compare Blue Harvest with the Robot Chicken Star Wars special and you see FG following the original plot and dialog with occasional slight tweaks. When they digress heavily, and they only do it a handful of times, they end up doing rather unsuccessful versions of their normal non sequiturs. Robot Chicken, on the other hand, showed a great deal of creativity. It actually came up with new ideas in the setting of Star Wars, where FG mostly just drew the original Star Wars movie.
Do any of the CPU reviews use old CPUs? What I what to know is how much faster today's CPU is compared to my 3-6 year old CPU, but these hardware reviews typically have a low end much newer/faster than my current system. Practically, a 50% CPU edge is too marginal for me to upgrade, but if a new system was 3X faster than my current aging machine I would be tempted!
tomshardware.com
1 - Distance measurements are currently kludged together very carefully using bridging. We use one measurement, for instance parallax based on the Earth's movement over 6 months, to show us the distance to a star that has some particular properties and which our models say should always be a certain luminosity. The parallax measurement has error bars.
2- Then we find a much more distant star of that same type that is near a particular type of supernova, and measure its brightness, comparing that to the brightness of our first star to give the distance to the distant star, and thus the supernova as well. That has bigger error bars.
3- Then we look for that type of supernova in very very distant galaxies. Supernovae are brighter than the rest of their galaxy put together while they're burning hot, so we can see them at tremendous distances. We use the measured brightness of that supernova to determine the distance to its galaxy.
4- Then we pair the knowledge of its distance with its velocity with respect to us, which we can determine through redshifting of something with a familiar spectrum. More error bars. That becomes a single point for the determination of the Hubble Constant (and yes, the "constant" is changing).
With only a cursory glance at TFA, it looks to me like this is a way to skip to step 3 or 4, thereby avoiding the need to bridge these length-scales using several techniques.
I agree. From my understanding, California is one of those states where textbooks are chosen by a state board and used throughout the state. In other words, individual districts do not evaluate and choose their own textbooks. Do you have to be a conspiracy theorist to suspect an enormous amount of politicking? I think it's fair to say that books are swapped out long before they need to be more for the benefit of the textbook companies and the politicians they're in bed with.
Of course, they obscure this by developing all sorts of "innovative" curriculum changes that require "up-to-date" textbooks that employ "cutting edge" pedagogical methods. Sorry, but I'm not fooled.
20 year old textbooks are typical in CA public schools. Generally textbooks are used until a large fraction of them are falling apart. I went to a private school in CA as well where we had to buy our books. At the end of the year we could sell them back to the school for 90% of the initial value, though, and they were then sold the next year to a new student for the same amount we got for selling them. All of the textbook costs were thus handled by students, but the final "rental" cost per book was $5-10. Were students to actually read electronic textbooks on their computers, electrical costs could be in this same realm. Of course, the reality is that teachers will print out textbooks. If we assume $0.02 per copy, that's about $10 per book charged to the state, and if new books cost as little to the state as they did to students at my school, after 5-10 years this plan will actually cost the state more per student than a real book would.
Am I the only one who finds Google web search less and less useful? There's no way to really force literal search anymore.
So true and frustrating! I can't tell you how many times recently I've tried searching for something "SPECIFIC" and not been able to at all. :-(
I would love to know of a useful alternative that searches for what *I* want, rather than what some non-intelligence presumes I might want (and just wastes my time and their resources).
Yahoo almost always does a better job there, but they don't play very nice with literal searching either. I wish that the search technology commonly used in the mid 90s on, for instance, Lexis Nexis would finally percolate up to mainstream web search engines and replace the primitive grunting, pointing, and shrugging engines used now.
The place I think Apple is still blowing it is in the "netbook" space. I will not spend over $1,000 for an Air to just do email and surf the net. In fact I just bought a Dell Mini 12 with Ubuntu for that, and at $500 is much easier on the wallet. No entry here by Apple despite Apple having a Mobile ready OS, unlike bloated Windows (reason why netbooks run XP), which I just do not get. Just do not fully understand Apple's poo-pooing the netbook space. I see a Netbook as a supplement to my bigger system, that I prefer not to carry. The iPhone can do some basic stuff on the road, but the screen is just not big enough for "surfing" the web, and handling documents etc...
Based on my experience with the Mini 9 and Windows 7 RC compared to the same machine with Ubuntu and XP, I think it's going to take a lot to beat MS in terms of performance on a netbook any time soon.
You are basing your entire argument on the assumption that skipping grades hurts your ability to socialize. Yet you have no proof or even explanation of this. I posit more intelligent students would have a better time getting along with elder students. And that skipping a grade is no more harmful to your social education than is moving. And that may be beneficial to your social education, learning to adapt to the new environment could be good (it was for me personally). Seeing the world from a different perspective may give you a different set of insights. Just because it is different doesn't mean it's wrong, unless that is the social lesson you are trying to impart. I think completing high school and university early could give him time to explore other interests of his. I doubt his parents will throw him out on his own just because he finished university when he could have taken 10more years.
In any case I find this is one of those things society has taken for granted as common knowledge but it has no studies backing it and no real logical foundation to stand on, yet policy is built around it.
The 12-14 year old kids at my college were completely isolated, basically because they were terrified to leave their rooms or talk to anyone, even in class discussions. It's an anecdote, sure, but there were several of them. Or there were at first, before most disappeared, I'm guessing to either drop out or go some place closer to home. Dorms + children = bad.
No. He is simply smart enough to know that no one will like him unless he is modest about his accomplishments.
What do you think people would say about him if he said "Im the greatest of all time. Divide like a butterfly, add like a bee. Your all stupidheads!"
This is so obvious that my brain hurt when the GP didn't realize it.
Gaensicke and colleagues envision two scenarios that might explain the object. In one, a carbon-rich star gets too close to a middle- or heavy-weight black hole, which tears the star apart. Some of this material is absorbed by the black hole, and some is blasted away in a flare that was eventually seen from Earth as SCP 06F6.
I'm not educated in astrophysics and everytime I read something like this I wonder, how does anything manage to get "blasted away" from a black hole? I was under the impression anything that got close to it was absorbed?
Black holes gravitationally pull matter toward them like any other object with the same mass, until you're inside the event horizon, at which point there is no escape. Thus, outside the event horizon, objects will tend to orbit the black hole just as they'd orbit a star of equal mass. Over time, the orbit of gas falling into a black hole decays and the gas falls toward the singularity and its orbital velocity increases. When this happens, the volume occupied by the orbit of the gas decreases, leading to higher density gas and thus heat generated through friction and compression. This heat raises the temperature of the gas, which increases its pressure and can result in a portion of the gas being blown off into space.
The Wii does all of this for about 20W and has a much smaller form factor. I'd say it's much more "green" that the Pulse.
Last time I checked (42 seconds ago), the Wii wasn't a very good replacement for a PC for non-gaming. It was also an order of magnitude slower than a 9800 GT for gaming, and had only a couple of good games.
The real competitor for this is a home built PC based on the Zotac Ion mainboard. Cheaper and better are simultaneously possible if you make it yourself.
Getting rid of stupid clients would be godsent for any admin in the world. Having all applications in the browser would be a huge step forward.
You try, getting three different clients working against a database from the same vendor working properly. They all crave different versions of dotnet, java or whatnot and any new version of the client software demands countless hours of testing just about every possible combination of apps. Upgrades are pure nightmare. Couple this with locked down desktops, profiles that has to be managed and policies that needs hard testing before you alter a single setting.
Getting rid of all those problems alone would be worth serious money for any company. Added benefit would be that backend services would be totally decoupled from what OS the client runs. Microsoft will fight this for all they are worth.
Getting rid of stupid houses would be a godsend for any contractor in the world. Having all people inside a mud hut would be a huge step forward.
You try getting three different walls working against the same roof from the same floor working properly. They all crave different stud layout, nails or whatnot and any new wall demands countless hours of planning for just about every possible combination of other walls. Electrical is a pure nightmare. Couple this with locked doors, surfaces that need to be painted and building codes that need hard testing before you can finish a single room.
Getting rid of all those problems alone would be worth serious money for any construction company. Added benefit would be that the extension cord used to steal electricity from neigbors would be totally decoupled from the type of mud hut. Legacy housebuilders will fight this for all they are worth.
I always thought bundling useful tools with an operating system(i.e. IE) was a poor example of leveraging a monopoly to corner a market.
However, discontinuing support for old products to FORCE new ones on customers, that is leveraging a monopoly in an anti-competitive manner. This is a much more reasonable case to take against Microsoft's more shady practices.
Anti-competitive means that it hurts the competition. How will discontinuing sales of XP hurt the competition?
So the villains are the ones reporting the crime, not the person breaking the law?
By the way, Google, Mozilla, Adobe, and many other companies joined the complaint.
Laws aren't necessarily just.
Oh, come on. Why would they go through the trouble and risk causing a public stir while they can just continue to sit on P2P networks and go fishin'? And before anybody cries "MediaSentry", remember that one need not hack your box to get your i.p. address.
1) They want a public stir. That's the point of their anti-piracy campaign. Scaring 10000 file sharers doesn't do much when there are a fifty million other sharers in the same country who don't notice the stir.
2) The lawsuits haven't slowed piracy.
3) Even if they had slowed piracy, the only metric by which the recording industry measures anti-piracy success is through their sales. Yes, they've been ridiculously high during the recession, but that doesn't mean they think they're high enough.
The Mozilla Foundation makes many tens of millions of dollars from Google. If nobody installs Firefox, Google isn't going to be giving them that kind of money anymore.
The real villains aren't the mozilla people - they're the Opera devs. They put this ball in motion.
Well considering this is a slash-ad for Win7, and the last time I read about Win7 and Vista going against WinXP in benchmarks it got its ass kicked, I am really not surprised they didn't run against XP. I especially liked the part where Infoworld said that XP should only win until you go past 8 cores, that after that Vista and Win7 should win. Of course how many of us are likely to have a 16 or 24 core box sitting around anytime soon?
Hell most of the time my Phenom dual core sits around twiddling its thumbs because it has so much more power than what is required for most everyday tasks. What in the hell would most of us even DO with a 16 or 24 core box besides crank up our electric and cooling bills? When I built this new box I finally took the plunge and went to XP X64 and I have to say I am impressed. It has run everything I have thrown at it with the exception of a 7 year old cheapo TV tuner which I found an X64 replacement for a grand total of $34. So while I think Win7 looks purty, I think I'll just sit this one out, thanks. To anyone who hasn't tried it XP X64 is awesome if you mobo supports it. And with all the bells and whistles, along with a real firewall and AV, I'm running a grand total of 438Mb of RAM, leaving the bulk of my 4 and soon to be 8Gb of RAM for the stuff I ACTUALLY want to run, you know, things other than the OS.
Add to that the fact that XP X64 doesn't seem to be pounding the firewall wanting to call home like Vista did, along with running every single game and app I have thrown at it thanks to WOW, and I think I've found a winner. Question to you Win7 users: Does it try to phone home all the damned time like Vista did last time I tried it? Does it support the older games and apps as well as XP?
The benchmarks in your link found that in terms of accessing 10 concurrent instances of a SQL database, running transactions against 10 concurrent instances of an Outlook .pst file simultaneously, and playing 10 .asf files ALL simultaneously, XP achieved more operations per clock cycle than Windows 7.
This is the only benchmark that has found 7 to be slower than XP. It's obviously not what a consumer OS is optimized to run. As we've seen in several other benchmarks, 7 is equivalent to XP for gaming, and faster than it for the vast majority of real world (run a handful of programs, do some photoshop editing, open a web browser, use Office, etc) tasks. Windows 7 has traded away its speed in simultaneously running the 30 absurd tasks in your benchmark, and in return it's faster in doing pretty much everything that a user who isn't using it as a server is going to do.
And you think this is bad.
Build 7000 (beta) was notably faster and slimmer than Build 7100 (RC) when we tried it here - 7000 was highly responsive and usable in 512MB, 7100 thrashes and is slow in 1GB. We were horrified. So forget 7000's admirable speed - it appears the RC was compiled with -fsuck-like-a-dyson-on-steroids enabled.
I just switched from 7000 to 7100 on a 1 gb netbook and saw no change in responsiveness. Both are much more responsive than XP, which liked to stall for ~3s at a time every time I ran something uncached on the Dell Mini 9's SSD. 7 hasn't done it once. You do know that in the first few hours of use it thrashes intentionally to build the index and populate superfetch, right?
He doesn't. He's just trolling (otherwise, he would show us the proof, or at least back up his statements some sort of evidence). Unfortunately these days on slashdot it's fashionable to make totally unfounded deragatory assertions about Apple, but if you say one word about Vista or the Office ribbons really aren't all that great, you get modded flamebait or troll.
I know Jobs, and to a much larger extent I know a lot of the people who have been a step or two down the ladder from Jobs over the last 20ish years. I know people on some of those patents, and in the cases I know, Jobs wasn't involved. He sets up the corporate vision under which the patents are produced. That's a valid reason for him to stamp his name onto them. The point of my post was to state that the difference between Gates and Jobs in this case is likely one of personal preferences. Jobs likes to stamp his name, Gates apparently doesn't.
Also, I didn't say anything negative about Apple. If you think that everyone (or anyone) at Apple likes Jobs on a personal note, you're quite out of touch.
His philanthropic accomplishments are certainly praiseworthy, but it's worth remembering that his vast wealth was mainly accumulated with some really unpleasent business tactics.
See "A History of Anticompetitive Behavior and Consumer Harm"
http://www.ecis.eu/documents/Finalversion_Consumerchoicepaper.pdf
Jobs has led his company through fewer, but still not close to zero, unpleasant business tactics. On a personal note, he goes out of his way to make his employees unhappy. He's also fabulously wealthy, and he doesn't give significant money to charity, where Gates has so far given half of his wealth away. Gates seems like the rather bad for some other businesses and good for the people he's affected, where Jobs is moderately bad for other businesses (or perhaps much worse, considering the inability of other companies to produce make clones) and terrible for the people he directly affects.